The Night Cameron Sat in the Audience
The 82nd Academy Awards delivered the best possible outcome and almost nobody was ready for it. The Hurt Locker won Best Picture. Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director—the first woman ever to do so, which should have happened decades earlier but happened then. James Cameron, her ex-husband, who had made Avatar, the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema at that point, sat in the audience and watched. No amount of blue aliens and motion capture and box-office records could make that anything other than extraordinarily funny.
Avatar is a film about the moral bankruptcy of colonialism, delivered by the most expensive colonial production apparatus in Hollywood history. That it lost to a spare, grinding film about soldiers defusing bombs in Iraq—one that reportedly cost less than what Cameron spent on a single department’s lunch—is the kind of irony that makes you believe briefly in something.
The rest of the ceremony was the usual extended exercise in collective performance. Jeff Bridges won Best Actor for Crazy Heart, which was correct. Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for The Blind Side, which was debatable. Christoph Waltz won Supporting Actor for Inglourious Basterds, the one genuinely exciting outcome of the night—a performance so precisely calibrated and quietly disturbing it deserved everything it got. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin hosted and delivered jokes that had been workshopped to death until they sounded spontaneous.
The In Memoriam segment stirred the annual controversy. Several prominent deaths from the previous year were felt to have been handled inadequately—Farrah Fawcett, Bea Arthur, Michael Jackson—the omissions and the ordering generating the predictable round of outrage. 2009 had been a particularly brutal year for the famous, and there was never enough time to do it properly, which is always the answer and never quite satisfying.
But the real story was Bigelow walking up there and taking the award. Not only because of the symbolism, though the symbolism was real and long overdue, but because The Hurt Locker is a genuinely great film—tense, physical, morally honest in ways that big-budget spectacle almost never manages. Cameron will keep making movies. He’ll make something enormous and technically staggering and everyone will go, and the conversation about whether scale is its own argument will restart from the beginning. And Bigelow will still have won.